Oy. Don’t get me started.
I have a soft spot in heart for that building’s absolute insanity. I always thought it was kind of delightful in a tear-your-hair-out-how-do-I-find anything sort of way. While I’m reminiscing, I want to ask if Professor Blankenship is still there (He was in the history department, so you might know.) One of my favorite professors, though I don’t think he’d remember me.
Sadly I see this as the current trend, and there doesn’t seem to be any stopping it. I personally don’t doubt the value of teaching and studying the humanities. No need to preach to the converted on that one. I don’t think it’s immediately useful to many skilled professions, and I think that’s the problem. Universities are becoming about training and employment. As long as this idea of what a university education is for continues along this path, I expect more of the same. The humanities just don’t present the same number of directly-related job opportunities, even when they should. God knows we need a few more historians and anthropologists in government, but that leads to a whole new discussion about the shrinking public sector.
It also leads to the denigration of non-technology oriented scientific research- but it will at least survive.
Yes, I am saying that the middle-class is disappearing. I’m also saying the tenured positions may not survive even if middle-class status for professors might. Tenure has always provided very secure employment for some but never all or even most academics. I might be wrong about that, but tenure is a poor job-security mechanism. It entrenches elites and presents a kind of barrier to entry. It’s only good if you’ve got it, and it’s highly political, which bodes poorly for people who are traditionally disenfranchised.
I understand why tenure is important, but I’m just not that impressed by its promise. I want middle-class status for most, and at least good living conditions for all. I’m radical enough to believe that food, shelter, medical care, and now the Internet should be a minimum debt society owes all people. So I want professors to at least be middle-class. I want them to be free to explore ideas without worrying about it affecting their employment. However, I think there’s an opportunity here for academics in the US: If they free themselves of this desire for an old-school notion of tenure, they could find an even better arrangement that isn’t so much at the mercy of fickle funding. I think “tenure” is a dirty word in university administrations, or at least a tired one, and maybe it’s time to find a better solution. Do I have one? No. I’m not a professor, I don’t know what your needs are. If you organized maybe you could track down a solution. (I say that like it’s easy. Getting a bunch of professional thinkers to agree on anything is damn near impossible.)
For the reasons stated above, I think of tenure as a rent-seeking behavior: At a point, it’s about barriers to entry and security for elites at the expense of everyone else. Is that a simplification? Yes, but not an over-simplification.
I wouldn’t trust technology not to solve a problem over a long enough timespan. It may well introduce new problems, but questioning the efficacy of MOOCs in pedagogy is going to produce diminishing returns over time.
